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Beck’s Record Club

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “I’ll Be Your Mirror” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. The songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happened over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering. There is no intention to ‘add to’ the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens.

on Beck’s website

Trailblazers

‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’
Vannevar Bush, ‘As We May Think’, 1945

TRAILBLAZERS is a live web surf event where you can show off your PRO surfing skills. No keyboard, no google, just pure links! At the event, the participants use a prepared computer with a modified browser: the address bar is removed and each click on a link is tracked by a counter. The goal is to get from one website to an other one by just clicking on links.

[via today and tomorrow]

Archives: Netizens and L’oading

I took advantage of these calm midsummer days to dig into my analog archive and reverse some material that otherwise would be lost. I’m very proud to show you what I found!
Here are some videos that document my first two exhibitions, both organized between the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003. They’re television reviews, so sometimes the voice over tells naive or even wrong stuff, and they’re available only in italian, but nonetheless…
I was younger, slimmer and full of enthusiasm :-)

The first two videos are about “Netizens. Cittadini della rete” (december 2002), a small show I curated in a private gallery in Rome. The show was not just about net art, but about making art in the age of the Internet, and more precisely, it tried to demostrate how important was for this new community of young artists to share a citizenship: the web citizenship.
Artists: Cory Arcangel/BEIGE, Elout De Kok, Jodi.org, Limiteazero, Carlo Zanni
more info: http://www.netizensonline.it/2002

The third video is a review of “L’oading. Videogiochi Geneticamente Modificati” (Genetically Modified Videogames). This show was open from January to March 2003 at the Siracusa City Museum, in Sicily and it was, as the title suggests, about artistic modifications of videogames.
I’m particularly happy that this video exists because this exhibition didn’t have a catalogue, so there’s no documentation around, and I think it was a great project.
Artists: Mauro Ceolin, Brody Condon, Arcangel Costantini, Corby&Baily, Delire, Victor Liu See-Lee, Nullpointer, Chiara Passa, Retroyou, Gentian Skhurti
more info: https://www.valentinatanni.com/2008/07/2003-loading-videogiochi-geneticamente-modificati/

Enjoy the jump in the past :-)

The Longest Photographic Exposures in History

“The German photography artist Michael Wesely has created these long exposures photos using a self-built pinhole camera. He captured the light of his objects for up to 3 years.
In 2001 he was invited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to use his unique technique to record the re-development of their building. He set up four cameras in four different corners and photographed the destruction and re-building of the MoMa until 2004 – leaving the shutter (the holes) open for up to 34 months.

[via neatorama and the iphone photo blog]

Iterating my way into oblivion

Carlo Zanni just published his last work, a new experiment in Data Cinema:
A Server Side generated movie where a guy is listening to a voice reading YouTube Terms of Service.
When YouTube changes its Terms of Service, the server behind the movie gets the new text and through a text-to-speech software renders the voice over which is then imported into the filmed sequence.

Rurality 2.0

I’m in Bisaccia (Avellino, Italy) for Interferenze, a great new media art festival that this year takes place in an ancient castle. The location is breathtaking and the program looks amazing also. I curated the Software Art and the Video sections. Here’s some links to the works:

Andrè Goncalves, “The Bird Watcher”, 2010
www.andregoncalves.info

Alessandro Capozzo, “Talea”, 2007-2010
www.abstract-codex.net

Corby, Baily & Mackenzie, “Southern Ocean Studies”, 2009-2010
www.reconnoitre.net/bas

Rick Silva, “A Rough Mix”, 2007, 8 min.
http://www.ricksilva.net

Bruno Muzzolini, “One step forward, two steps back”, 2007, 2.33 min.
http://www.fabioparisartgallery.com/muzzo/opere/asen/asen.html

Anders Weberg & Robert Willim, “Domestic Safari”, 2008, 10.32 min
http://www.weberg.se
http://www.robertwillim.com

Davide Sebastian, Oryza sativa, 2009, 3.46 min.
http://www.davidesebastian.com

Nicholas O’Brien, The Natural, 2008, 6 min.
http://www.doubleunderscore.net

Paintfx

PAINT FX is a painting collective/ club/ company/ brand/ website/ blog/ party consisting of Jon Rafman, Micah Schippa and Parker Ito.

“We’re kinda like Jogging meets Poster Company meets shiny stuff, but we’re way juicier.  Each work featured on the site is intended to belong to the brand PAINT FX as opposed to the individual who created the work.  Maybe we’ll outsource some work too.  We started the project because we were popping huge boners off of juicy gestural marks and we thought it would be fun and easy to make a lot of those.  But PAINT FX doesn’t favor styles or themes, but favors shiny computer screens.  In that way we’re like the “Cool School” (Finish Fetish) or maybe we are the “Too Kewl School”.  We don’t all live in California, but we can be categorized geographically (the Internet, duhhhhhhhhhh!).   It should also be noted that PAINT FX favors quantity over quality. The content of these paintings is mostly determined by the software’s capabilities – Art Rage, Photoshop, Corel Painter etc.  I think we’re very interested in “materials and materiality”, but we slip in some painting references every once and a while (Josh Smith, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol?).  In order to fully appreciate this project one must consider the site, the software, and the potential for these paintings to be transformed into objects (hint, hint).(Note: The statement for PAINT FX was written by Parker Ito, and may not necessarily reflect the perspectives of other participating members.)”

The Rise of the Online Gallery

The Rise of the Online Gallery :

Paddy Jonhson discusses the rise of a new kind of art gallery. Brad Troemel dubbed this spaces as “Dual Sites”: 

“Thus, internet art is marked by the compulsive urge of searching (or, surfing) to connect with others in a way that is not directed by privatized interests, but found and shared among individuals.[1] The Dual Site is an institution born from this individuated system of relating with one another. It is an exhibition space symptomatic of The Physical and The Digital’s comingling– an example of how art, like life itself, now exists somewhere between the two.”

(http://thejogging.tumblr.com/post/536420881/the-emergence-of-dual-sites) 

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LABoral photo report

“Para-Sites features a series of subtle interventions conceived for interstitial spaces, locations and human-scale architectural elements at Laboral. By means of projections, a parallel reality is superimposed on that of the space itself. The interventions work as parasites, disturbing and altering our perceptions of an already familiar place. ”

Last week I took a trip to Gijon, in order to attend the opening of Para-sites, an exhibition by Pablo Valbuena at LABoral. I also visited the other two shows currently on view in the museum: Habitar and Process as paradigm, which include lots of interesting projects. As usual, here’s my photoreport.

Avatar Days

Originally created for the Darklight Festival’s ‘4 Day Movie’ project, Avatar Days is a portrait of four online gamers in Dublin whose daily lives contrast with their virtual identities. Advanced 3D technologies and Motion Capture animation were used to insert the players’ in-game characters in place of their real selves against the backdrop of the banal urban landscape which they inhabit.

Guggenheim & Youtube

YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video aims to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Developed by YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum in collaboration with HP, YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. This global online initiative is not a search for what’s “now,” but a search for what’s next. Visit youtube.com/play to learn more and submit a video.

net.art is dead! Long live pop.net.art!

“net.art never died! It just moved to your local Internet-shop!”. An exhibition project by Aram Bartholl

“Hit an Internet-cafe, rent all computers they have and run a show on them for one night. All art works of the participating artists need to be on-line (not necessarily public) and are shown in a typical browser with standard plug-ins. Performance and life pieces may also use pre-installed communication programs (instant messaging, VOIP, video chat etc). Custom software (except browser add-ons) or off-line files are not permitted. Any creative physical modification to Internet cafe itself is not allowed. The show is public and takes place during normal opening hours of the Internet cafe/shop. All visitors are welcome to join the opening, enjoy the art (and to check their email.)”

SPEED SHOW manifest by Aram Bartholl 2010